When I woke up on Friday morning and read that Jerry Sloan has abruptly quit as head coach of the Utah Jazz, I panicked, as just three days earlier I had joked that I thought he was already dead. (It sounds way worse than it is.) I thought, “Oh great, he has cancer, now. Wait, am I going to be fired for this?”

Thankfully, he wasn’t sick, just sick and tired of dealing with his point guard, Deron Williams, who clearly knows far better what it takes to win in the NBA than a guy who coached two players into the NBA Hall of Fame, and won 1,130 games. Jerry Sloan was a no-nonsense player and an equally uncompromising coach. He was an illegal handcheck away from beating Jordan’s Bulls for an NBA title — twice. And, in five years, when he gets inducted into the Hall of Fame, Greg Ostertag should carry the guy to the podium.

Nevertheless, his abrupt departure does change the dynamic in the league’s Northwest division — where the Thunder begin to pick up the intensity, Denver manages to win while waiting for the other shoe to drop and Minnesota prays for a time machine to turn tomorrow in 2013, when they’ll be really super-competitive. I promise.

Oklahoma City (34–19)
Should’ve won last year and, arm-twisting, are my pick to win this year. Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook are the league’s most effective traditional big-small combo, and the teams has oodles of hungry young complementary players like Jeff Green, and that guy with the funny beard whose name escapes me. (He looks like the love child of Mateen Cleaves and Abe Lincoln.) Last year they pushed the Lakers to the brink and would’ve won if Nick Collison had only boxed Ron-Ron out on that series’ penultimate play. I remember watching Collison watching Kobe’s errant shot and tweeting, “Nick Collison, welcome to the rest of your life” because the play that will forever define his NBA career found him standing, hands by his side as Artest swooped in for the put-back. This year, the team will suffer from no such inexperience and, possessing a player that can get to the line 20 times in a single playoff game (Durant) may provide a wide-enough bandwagon for both Jeff Van Gundy and Steve Kerr to hop aboard.

Denver (31–24)
For the Nuggets management and players, waiting around to find out if/when Carmelo Anthony is dealt is like a boxer waiting to get his arm amputated. It’s going to happen and it’s going to ruin everything. The team is attempting to play chicken with the Knicks, who are offering a relatively measly package of Wilson Chandler, Anthony Randolph and the cash-stuffed corpse of Eddy Curry. Team management event went so far as to float a story that the Lakers were interested in trading Melo for Andrew Bynum — a notion as preposterous as it sounds. Melo, in a compassionate moment, indicated that he would consider singing an extension with the Nuggets, if they were unable to move him by the deadline. All this succeeds in doing is forcing the Knicks to offer a more generous package. Which is to say, a generous package. But whether or not Melo goes or stays, a team filled with Kenyon Martin, Nene and a fading Chauncey Billups isn’t going to get it done, no matter who the Knicks send west.

Utah (31–24)
As Utah, the state and the team, attempts to move on without Jerry Sloan, the lone bright spot with the whole mishegas is that new head coach Tyrone Corbin, who as a player squeezed every drop from his talent now gets a chance to convince Williams — one of the game’s top three point guards — to stay in the most boring, sterile major city in the United States. (The bet here is that he bolts irrespective of how the team finishes the season. I was there for 36 hours once and bolted.) In the meantime, the core four of Williams, Paul Milsap, Al Jefferson and an oddly underachieving Andrei Kirilenko will be an unpopular first-round opponent due to the fact that they had the benefit of playing for Coach Sloan. Go figure.

Portland (30–24)
Every season it’s the same story: Portland looks strong on paper and people begin to refer to them as a “breakout team”. The Blazers have size, speed, can shoot and possess maybe the most rabid fan base in the NBA. And so far this season, they’ve performed admirably well, although Brandon Roy needs to be healthy for the team to make the second round of the playoffs. Both Andre Miller and Marcus Camby have been revelations — considering they are long past the point where even the most optimistic of us thought they’d be useful — and some day LaMarcus Aldridge will be mentioned among the league’s Top 10 players. Wesley Mathews and Nicolas Batum position the team well for the future. And Rudy Fernandez is only going to get better. Who knows? Maybe Greg Oden will accept the veteran’s minimum next season and try to earn even a fraction of that the team has paid him. That changes the dynamic overnight. But in what is a same–old story they are a good team in a very competitive conference, ergo, no championship banner in Portland for the foreseeable future.

Minnesota (13–41)
Kevin Love, man. It just goes to show you the inexact science of the draft. I can’t think of one self- or otherwise-proclaimed expert who thought he would be a very successful pro, and certainly not a starter. Love was subjected to the same raps that players like him usually face: too slow, no mid-range jump shot, white. But he certainly looks much quicker as a pro than he did at UCLA and is one of the NBA’s great revelations this season. The T-Wolves are a team on the come-up that isn’t exactly coming up yet. Most of their best players (Michael Beasley, Corey Brewer and, probably Martell Webster) are in their 2nd or 3rd years, and remember, Ricky Rubio, the wunderkind point guard who’s been hiding out in Spain, may eventually decide to try his luck. If given the chance to grow together, the coaching staff — featuring head coach Kurt Rambis and assistants Bill Laimbeer, Reggie Theus and Dave Wohl — will be able to put a team on the court that plays with a lot of energy and creative freedom (Theus, Wohl) and elbows (Laimbeer, Rambis). They’re certainly a few years from contending, but they sure are entertaining to watch. If you have League Pass, of course.

Tony Gervino is a New York City-based editor and writer obsessed with honing his bio to make him sound quirky. He can also be found here.

Photo by Carlos Zamarriego, from Flickr.

South Dakota is going to vote on a bill that amends its justifiable homicide law! They want to make sure that you can kill people with justification if someone is going to harm your unborn child “or the unborn child of that person’s spouse, partner, parent, or child.” The amendment passed out of committee with a handy 9–3 vote. So you can see where this is going. (Fun fact: the law as written already allows you to kill to prevent a felony being performed upon your master or your servant.) The personhood movement is achieving success state by state (just like the gay marriage movement, sort of!) and they are going to try out a new tactic in Ohio: banning abortions after pregnancies of four weeks.

“Great. Women are always appreciated, sometimes even agreeable.”
 — Piero Longo, attorney for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, tries to find the bright side to the fact that his client will stand trial on charges of having sex with an underage prostitute and official misconduct related to the underage prostitute: the three judge panel that will rule in the case is all women.

The Hollywood Reporter’s obituary for Kenneth Mars refers to him as “a farcical character actor best known for playing the police inspector with a creaky prosthetic arm in Mel Brooks’ 1974 classic Young Frankenstein,” which seems crazy: He was and always will be Franz Liebkind, the Nazi playwright of The Producers. I mean, yes, there was plenty of other stuff, but the Churchill v. Hitler monologue in Producers alone is a comic legacy for the ages. Mars was 75.

The determined forays of hallowed Western faith traditions into the digital-media world rarely produce a non-embarrassing outcome. There are your teen-themed “Bible-zine” translations. There are your evangelical trade shows. There are your media churches. But the recent news that the Catholic Church was launching a quasi-official confession app on the iPhone was something else again — and not just because it got snapped up in the related Maureen Dowd column-generating software.

To be fair, the app — the brainchild of a pair of entrepreneurial Indiana-based Catholic brothers, Patrick and Chip Leinen — is not designed to supplant the traditional rite of confession, spoken in anonymity to a real-life priest sequestered in a box. It’s more in the nature of a confession aid — a customized digital enounter tailored to the special needs of a particular sinning demographic. “A priest won’t have the same examination as a teen girl or a married man,” Patrick Leinen told the Catholic News Agency. “You will get something unique to you.” A scalable examination of the human conscience may not yet prompt a boom in digital contrition — at least not until it’s somehow customized further to work on an Angry Birds platform — but it’s something of a formal breakthrough for a faith tradition that hasn’t exactly made “user-friendliness” a watchword. (One also assumes that if the Church-sanctioned app solicits a confession of sexual abuse from a member of the clergy, it will trigger a Mission Impossible-style immolation of app, phone and — who knows? — user.)

Being no strangers to the hierarchical cast of Catholic devotion themselves, the Leinens cite the authority of the papal bureaucracy — namely, the directive from Pope Benedict XVI calling for greater engagement with the social media platforms favored by today’s youth. The Leinen brothers also took pains to win the imprimatur of South Bend Bishop Kevin C. Rhodes, and collaborated on the finer points of the app’s graduated sin-inspection software with a pair of priests, Thomas G. Weinandy, the executive director of the U.S. bishops’ Secretariat for Doctrine and Pastoral Practices, and Dan Scheidt, pastor of Queen of Peace Catholic Church in the nearby Indiana town of Mishawaka.

Still, for all this ex officio punctiliousness, one can’t help feeling that a confession app is a bit off-base. For one thing, it’s aimed at generating a profit, costing $1.99 per user. Has the senior Church hierarchy really forgotten that a mere six hundred years or so ago the open retailing of priestly forgiveness furnished a central grievance of the Reformation?

More troubling still is the question of anonymity. Yes, we are assured, the security protocols of the confession software are sound, but there’s a more fundamental reason that iPhone apps fall under the generic rubric of “social media” — users generally employ them in complete indifference to their surroundings, further denaturing the increasingly porous cultural boundaries that separate out public and private conduct. While the app may ultimately land a wrongdoer in front of a duly solemn confessor in the designated sanctum of a church, completing a subjective moral inventory isn’t something that’s meant to be done during some dead time on a conference call, or while you’re impatiently scouring the departure board at Grand Central Station.

In other words, it’s probably best that the buildup to confession be inconvenient, with a minimum of media distraction involved. According to all manner of Christian moralists, divine judgment is a harrowingly solitary affair, and one reason that the priest in the confession box is concealed — apart from ensuring full anonymity to both parties in confession — is to symbolize the impersonal nature of god’s judgment. Without that screened-in generic symbol of divine authority, Church fathers reckoned, confessors would be apt to conceal their mortal sins out of a sense of personal shame. Initiating that same process via an iPhone app, by contrast, is a bit like trying to administer extreme unction via a Netflix stream. There’s a reason that a fully mechanized vision of the confessional was trotted out as a joke, after all, in Woody Allen’s futurist farce Sleeper (back in 1973, that is, where the innovation seemed laughably remote, and Allen was still capable of executing convincing jokes on film).

Viewed from the logic of the new information age, a digitized confession is but another step in the broader diffusion of the vital human stuff of soul, intelligence and selfhood — the cyber-utopian, new-machine dynamism that Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson hymn (in different keys, to be fair) before the mirror each morning in their own rote and priestly fashion. Still, for all the soothing appurtenances that attach to way-new digital faith, it’s hard to see how the duly wired believer can significantly advance behind the dour Catholic counsel of Blaise Pascal: “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”

Chris Lehmann has been our religion columnist.

I MEAN. A bear from Knifecrime Island who smokes and drinks and wants to kill himself? If they came up with a bear for me in a lab, it would be this bear. I mean, it hits a little close to home, but the truth always does.

“My girlfriend wants to move to another country where there are more job opportunities but a much higher crime rate. I’m terrified of going, as I don’t think I’d ever fit in and feel safe walking the streets (which I love to do), but there’s no future where we live now, and I don’t think I’d ever make enough money to even move out of my parents’ house. What should I do?”
 — Awl pal Julie Klausner’s advice column is pretty much what you’d expect, which is to say hysterical.

That really is a pretty excellent video Odd Future rapper Tyler the Creator created for his new solo singe, “Yonkers.” (Questions of realness aside, it is a pretty excellent song. What was that 50 said back then about where all the other hard rappers were from?) My favorite part is when he lets that enormous cockroach crawl up his arm. Then he pretends to eat it and throw it up. Which is gross. I like the part where he lets it crawl on him. I had one of those giant cockroaches crawl on my arm once. It was not as disgusting as it sounds.

Last year, my kid got into these Sunday science programs they do at the Audubon Science Center in Prospect Park. They have lots of snakes and lizards and stuff at the place, and they have these giant cockroaches, there, in a glass fish tank. Madagascar hissing cockroaches, they’re called, or gromphadorhina portentosa. They’re totally cool. Totally prehistoric-looking. All armored and fierce, like little living Panzers. My kid and I were looking at them one time and the friendly park ranger science nerd came over and asked us if we wanted to hold them. “They’re friendly,” she said. “They don’t bite.”

My kid’s eyes lit up. “Yeah!” he said. He was psyched. I was less psyched. These things are huge. Like three inches of thick bug. And they did hiss, loudly and in a threatening way, when the lady reached her hand in to fished around the wood chips to pluck one out.

They live in the forest in Madagascar, apparently, not gutters or people’s houses. And they eat mostly fruit and vegetable material. They give birth to live young — 60 tiny nymph roaches emerging from an internal egg sac called an “ootheca” (awesome!) in the female’s abdomen. You’ll probably not want to think about that.

The lady told my kid to roll up his sleeve once she caught one of the things, because they liked to crawl inside people’s shirts and that usually made people freak out and scream. He held out his hand and she placed a large male specimen in his palm. He giggled as it ran up his arm and skrittered towards his neck. I shuddered and said no thanks when she offered to pull out another for me. But then I looked at my kid, who clearly had a bit of the willies but was being brave and enjoying the experience, and I said okay.

They’re not slimy or gross at all, really, to touch, hissing cockroaches. Their shells are smooth like car upholstery. Their feet feel kind of creepy on your skin, I suppose. But no worse than if you’ve ever held a sand crab at the beach. You get used to it pretty quick.

I suppose that’s why they used them — that and that they’re distinctly sinister looking — Jeannot Szwarc used them to make his campy 1975 horror flick. They’re obviously good actors, Madagascar hissing cockroaches. They keep getting such high-profile work.

Buy her a lingerie or pajama set so she can put it on after she get out nahmean. Have a little cake for her or whatever whatever whatever.less than a minute ago via web

Ghostface Killah
GhostfaceKillah

Y’all go down to the motherfuckin hotel, they got a bunch of activities y’all can do. Go on boat rides and shit, you do all that shit.less than a minute ago via web

Ghostface Killah
GhostfaceKillah

If you missed Ghostface Killah giving Valentine’s Day advice to straight men all day, well… you really missed something! (According to Mr. Killah, the secret is to “make your girl happy.” Also cunnilingus.) You know I just never thought I’d be saying this, but here I am, following Ghostface Killah. Also back in mid-January, he had a lengthy treatise on real friends v. fake friends that actually made a lot of sense to me as well! And back in early January, he had a long run on how to tell if you’re being cheated on. Anyway, if it’s too much record promotion up in that piece for you, and you prefer just the good advice, try advice columnist and CEO Tionna Smalls! She is out there helping women get their mind right every day — she’s so dedicated that she’s about to go back to school to become a therapist even. (Previously.)

by Abe Sauer

One doesn’t need to go to the Middle East or Northern Africa to find a people-versus-government showdown. At this very moment in Wisconsin, one of the most important labor battles in decades is already going down at the state capital in Madison.

On one side is Tea Party Republican Governor Scott Walker and a GOP legislature hell-bent on making Wisconsin “open for business.” On the other side are the state’s labor unions, which Walker’s latest budget aims to fully field dress, gut and strap down to the hood of his car, tongue hanging out and all. Across the state, Wisconsinites are organizing for protests and vigils, including, of course, the Purple People Eaters. Walker has — no shit — said that he will call in the National Guard if necessary. Here’s a fast look at line items from Walker’s just-released budget that, if successful, may soon find themselves in a legislature near you.

Walker’s special session bill begins: “Under current law, municipal employees have the right to collectively bargain over wages, hours, and conditions of employment under the Municipal Employment Relations Act (MERA), and state employees have the right to collectively bargain over wages, hours, and conditions of employment under the State Employment Labor Relations Act (SELRA). This bill changes MERA and SELRA with respect to all employees…”

It continues, “This bill limits the right to collectively bargain for all employees who are not public safety employees…”

The highlights:

COLLECTIVE BARGAINING. Make various changes to limit collective bargaining for most public employees to wages. Total wage increases could not exceed a cap based on the CPI unless approved by referendum. Contracts would be limited to one year and wages would be frozen until a new contract is settled. Collective bargaining units are required to take annual votes to maintain certification as a union. Employers would be prohibited from collecting union dues and members of collective bargaining units would not be required to pay dues. Changes effective upon expiration of existing contracts. Law enforcement, fire employees and state troopers and inspectors would be exempt from the changes.

STATE EMPLOYEE ABSENCES AND OTHER WORK ACTIONS. Authorizes appointing agencies to terminate any employees that are absent for three days without approval of the employer or any employees participating in an organized action to stop or slow work if the governor has declared a state of emergency.

QUALITY HEALTH CARE AUTHORITY. Repeals the authority of home health care workers under the Medicaid program to collectively bargain.

CHILD CARE LABOR RELATIONS. Repeals the authority of family child care workers to collectively bargain with the state.

UW HOSPITALS AND CLINICS BOARD AND AUTHORITY. Repeals collective bargaining for UWHC employees. State positions currently employed by the UWHC are eliminated and incumbents are transferred to the UWHC Authority.

UW FACULTY AND ACADEMIC STAFF. Repeals authority of UW faculty and academic staff to collectively bargain.

Authorizes DOA to sell state heating plants, with the net proceeds deposited in the budget stabilization fund.

PENSION CONTRIBUTIONS. Require that employees of WRS employers and the City and County of Milwaukee contribute 50% of the annual pension payment. The payment amount for WRS employees is estimated to be 5.8% of salary in 2011.

HEALTH INSURANCE CONTRIBUTIONS. Requires state employees to pay at least 12.6% of the average cost of annual premiums.

That adds up to a complete gutting of unions’ ability to collectively bargain (including teachers!) and mandates increased payments from those employees to pension and health insurance costs (essentially amounting to a pay cut). And that little item about the power to terminate employees? Here’s a scenario where that gets useful fast. Walker passes the bill. Public employees revolt against its draconian measures. With state services crippled, Walker declares state of emergency. The political pals that now head the state agencies (“appointing agencies”) cite the bill and fire the hell out of everyone. Enter the National Guard (as noted, already on alert).

Oh, it also puts state-owned assets up for fire sale. (For how this goes, see the chapter “The Outsourced Highway” in Matt Taibbi’s latest book, Griftopia.)

Nobody would expect Walker to have any sense of history but his mention of the National Guard in reference to a labor dispute is chilling to those who recall the Bay View riot. In May 1886, nearly 15,000 workers gathered in Milwaukee to demand an eight hour workday. Thousands marched the streets with banners in Polish, German and English. Wisconsin Governor Jeremiah Rusk called the National Guard to respond; seven were killed (five by other estimates) and several more wounded.

Of course it’s appropriate that this would happen in Wisconsin, a state that embraced the organized labor movement more heartily than any other. From the early bricklayers and carpenters unions of the 1840s to the formation of the Eight-Hour League to Robert La Follette’s progressive trail blazing, Wisconsin has been one of organized labor’s greatest friends. In 1911, it was the first state to enact worker compensation protections. In 1932, it was the first to pass unemployment compensation. And in 1959, it was one of the first states to pass a law supporting collective bargaining for public employees. Ironic that conservatives are credited with adding the teachers union to this collective bargaining bill in the hopes that it would kill it.

And odd as well that so many conservatives constantly speak of going back to a better America while at the same time undoing the accomplishments of that very better American time.

It was just back in 2009 the governor signed signed AB 172, also known as the “Labor History in the Schools bill,” requiring public schools to make labor and collective bargaining history part of the social studies curriculum.

The greatest obscenity of all is that the Republican Party was also created in Wisconsin. In early 1854, in the “Little White Schoolhouse” in Ripon, Alvan Bovay and 16 men gathered. They opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would allow states to choose if they wanted legalized slavery. Specifically, the men opposed slavery and disenfranchisement of the citizenry — which makes ironic Walker and the Wisconsin GOP’s recent plan for a voter ID law (despite just twenty cases of voter fraud in the state in the last decade).

That newly formed Republican party gained steam and elected its first winning candidate, Abraham Lincoln. Five years after the Ripon meeting, he wrote: “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” You’ve come a long way, baby.

Abe Sauer can be reached at abesauer [at] gmail.com.